Storytellers' Institute Festosium™

June 9–12, 2016

Tang Teaching Museum

Festosium™ (n). A gathering that combines the best elements of a festival to showcase and a symposium
to bring together a small group of scholars and artists to engage with intellectual
and creative work.

MDOCS’ inaugural festosium will be held June 10–12, 2016, with filmmakers, audio creators,
visual artists, and virtual reality designers presenting recent documentary work that
interrogates the division between fact and fiction, truth and reality.

All events are hosted at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum on the Skidmore College
campus. Everything is free and open to the public.

Ann Heppermann and Martin Johnson, founders of The Sarah Awards and hosts of the Serendipity podcast, will present audio works and lead a discussion about how in this Second
Golden Age of Radio, fictional works have been used to articulate truths that have
primarily been the purview of documentary.

Saturday, June 11

Marc Beaudet, founder and director of Turbulent.ca and Loïc Suty, director of the
design team on The Unknown Photographer, discuss the creation of research-based virtual realities. Their latest work, The Unknown Photographer, began with a WWI photo album that inspired a documentary film and 20-minute virtual
reality experience.

2 p.m.: Audio presentation and discussion: The Evolution of Movies in Our Heads

Ann Heppermann will lead Kaitlin Prest in a discussion about the evolution of her
award-winning audio piece Movies in Your Head. The piece is the story about a woman who falls fast in love and begins to imagine
the future she will have with her new girlfriend. When things fall apart, she then
questions whether every kiss, utterance, and conversation was real or imagined. The
piece started off as a documentary—more than 20 people were interviewed and a rough
documentary was cut. But for Prest, the rough documentary felt less true than the
story she felt she could tell in fiction.

Sunday June 12

11 a.m.–1 p.m.: Roundtable: Teaching with Documentary

2 p.m.: Sneak Preview Screening: Lee & Opal

Description: Deep in Kentucky coal country, Lee and Opal Sexton continue to farm their
land along Linefork Creek. Well into his 80s, Lee is a retired coal miner and revered
banjo legend, a living link to the deep past of American music. Though hampered by
hearing loss, Lee continues to perform at square dances and teach his distinctive
style to a new generation eager to preserve a vanishing cultural tradition. Filmed
over three years, Lee & Opal offers an immersive view of its subjects' daily rituals and their inherent resiliency,
while documenting the raw yet delicate music of a singular musician, linked to the
past yet immediately present.

ANN HEPPERMANN is documentary artist, reporter, and educator. Her Peabody award-winning work has
aired on numerous public radio shows including This American Life, 99% Invisible, and Radiolab. In 2011 she was named a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow. She teaches audio
fiction and narrative journalism at Sarah Lawrence College in its writing program.
Bitch Magazine once called her a “sort of Goddess of podcasting.” She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Learn more about The Sarah Lawrence College International Audio Fiction Awards, co-founded
by Ann Heppermann and Martin Johnson (below) at www.thesarahawards.

JEFF SILVA is an American filmmaker, teacher, and film programmer based in France. Jeff’s work
explores the quotidian aspects of his subjects' lives, often over long spans of time.
His most recently completed personal projects include Linefork (2016), Ivan & Ivana (2011), and Balkan Rhapsodies: 78 Measures of War (2008) have been exhibited at festivals and museums internationally, including MoMA's
Documentary Fortnight, The Viennale, Visions du Reel, Valdivia, Flahertiana, and DocAviv.
An affiliate of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University since 2006. The
SEL is a practice-based program of visual anthropology exploring the interstices of
art, anthropology, and documentary film, where Jeff between its inception in 2006
until 2009 developed the curriculum and methodology of the program aside founder and
director Lucien Taylor. Jeff has also been programming documentary and experimental
cinema for the past 15 years at BALAGAN, an offbeat and alternative screening series
that he co-founded in 2000 in Boston.

Founded in 2002, Turbulent creates, produces, and distributes award-winning cross-platform and transmedia projects
with an emphasis on content, community, and a even eCommerce. Creative and efficient,
they love challenges and imagining the best solutions to address them. They believe
that the achievement of ambitious projects and brands starts with a creative use of
technology. Passionate about their work and working as a team, combining their strengths
to always surpass themselves, they're convinced that the quality of their projects
is proportional to the passion they have in achieving them. Turbulent is behind the
entire online platform of the Guinness World Record-setting crowdfunded project Star Citizen, a AAA video game created by Chris Roberts. They developed My CEC Zone, an award-winning educational digital platform that supports 70% of primary and secondary
school students in Quebec. They conceived and produced Champlain's Dream, the most successful convergent project in Canada in terms of number of users and
impact on client business. Turbulent's latest achievement, The Unknown Photographer, is a virtual-reality immersion into the fragmented memories of a World War I photographer
that is currently touring the world and was part of the official selection of New
Frontiers at the Sundance Film Festival 2016.

The Turbulent team (Marc Beaudet, left, president and co-founder, and Loic Suty, right, creative director of The Unknown Photographer) is bringing their 20-minute virtual-reality immersive experience The Unknown Photographer to the 2016 Storytellers' Institute Festosium for attendees to experience throughout
the weekend.

MARTIN JOHNSON is the creative director at Ljudbang productions in Stockholm and a radio producer,
journalist, sound designer and author. In 2008 he won Prix Italia for his documentary
My Father Takes a Vacation. His work has been broadcast around the world in England, Canada, USA, Germany, Hungary,
Italy, Finland, Norway, and Ireland. His collection of essays called The Ocean was published in 2012 with much critical acclaim and is translated into several Languages.
He has written several radio drama plays, including a story for The Sarah Awards launch.

NICOLÁS PEREDA is a filmmaker whose work explores the everyday through fractured and elliptical
narratives using fiction and documentary tools. His work has been the subject of more
than 20 retrospectives worldwide in venues such as Anthology Film Archive, Pacific
Film Archive, Jeonju International Film Festival, and TIFF Cinematheque. He’s also
presented his films in most major international film festivals including Cannes, Berlin,
Venice, Locarno, and Toronto, as well as in galleries and museums like the Reina Sofía
in Madrid, the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Guggenheim and MOMA in
New York, and on television stations such as HBO, Turner, MVS, Netflix, and ISat.
In 2010 he was awarded the Premio Orizzonti at the Venice Film Festival.

MAXIM POZDOROVKIN is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and media curator from Russia now based in
NYC. He’s the director of three feature docs and numerous short films. His documentary
Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (2013) premiered at Sundance, where it won a Special Jury Award. Released theatrically
worldwide, the film was shortlisted for an Academy Award. Maxim holds a PhD from Harvard
University and is currently an artist fellow at Harvard's Society of Fellows. His
most recent film, The Notorious Mr. Bout (2014), about Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, premiered at Sundance and screened
at festivals around the world. His first feature film, Capital, is a modern-day city symphony about the construction of a utopian city in Kazakhstan.

KAITLIN PREST is the creative director of The Heart Podcast on Radiotopia. She creates narrative audio experiences live and digital with
rich sound design and intimate subject macer. Her audio work was awarded the Hearsay
Festival’s Overall Prize 2014 and Prix Italia Golden Award for New Radio Formats 2015.

STEPHANIE SPRAY is a filmmaker, phonographer, and anthropologist whose work explores the confluence
of social aesthetics and art in everyday life. Born in Minnesota and raised in Alabama,
she has spent much of her adult life in Nepal, where she made the majority of her
films, videos, and sound pieces. Her work has been screened in film festivals around
the world, from Locarno to BAFICI, where it has won numerous prizes; exhibited in
museums such as the Whitney, MoMA, and the National Museum; and had theatrical releases
at home and abroad. She is completing her PhD in media anthropology in the Sensory
Ethnography Lab at Harvard University.